And it is so bad that even Bill Clinton had a whoopsie and spoke about it.

SLATE: During a campaign appearance on Monday in Michigan, Bill Clinton unleashed a riff
about the Affordable Care Act in which he argued the law had left us
with a “crazy system” that was hurting small businesses and middle-class
Americans.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016. Chaos and violence continue, Turkey's
proposal to keep troops in Iraq for another year meets with huge
resistance, Shi'ite militias stockpile weapons in Iraq, and much more.

ALSUMARIA reports
that Parliament is calling for the expulsion of the Turkish Ambassador
and for Iraq to cut all economic ties with Turkey. This is in response
to Turkey's Parliament voting earlier this month to extend the Turkish
military's mission in Iraq by one year.

Turkey has a history of suppressing Kurds which has led to various
groups of rebels/freedom fighters arising over the years. The PKK is
the most famous or infamous. It's a group of Kurds that have been
waging war on the Turksih government since the 80s in a fight for
Kurdish rights.

Aaron Hess (International Socialist Review) described the PKK in 2008,
"The PKK emerged in 1984 as a major force in response to Turkey's
oppression of its Kurdish population. Since the late 1970s, Turkey has
waged a relentless war of attrition that has killed tens of thousands of
Kurds and driven millions from their homes. The Kurds are the world's
largest stateless population -- whose main population concentration
straddles Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria -- and have been the victims of
imperialist wars and manipulation since the colonial period. While
Turkey has granted limited rights to the Kurds in recent years in order
to accommodate the European Union, which it seeks to join, even these
are now at risk."

Kurds are throughout the Middle East.

In Turkey, they live under a system of apartheid.

In Iraq, they tend to live in the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq.

The Turkish government has long feared that the KRG might move from
semi-autonomous to autonomous -- the fear being that an independent land
for Kurds would inspire Kurds outside of Iraq and fuel independence
movements.

Despite this fear, the post-2003 invasion Iraq period has seen the
Turkish government being much closer to the KRG than to the central
Iraqi government based in Baghdad.

Under Nouri al-Maliki's terms as prime minister (2006 -2014), for
example, Turkey was accused of helping to steal Iraqi oil and backing
terrorists.

Nouri did approve, however, of Turkey bombing northern Iraq.

Turkey has declared that its war planes bomb PKK terrorists.

The reality is that many farms in northern Iraq have been destroyed and many civilians have been left dead and injured.

In the fall of 2014, Haider al-Abadi became prime minister.

He has objected to the bombings carried out by Turkish airplanes as have
various other Iraqi officials; however, the US State Dept has
pronounced these bombings necessary and that apparently means the end of
the story.

The announcement that Turkey would extend its Iraq mission for another year has kicked off the latest round of disagreements.

Iraq has made clear that it does not want Turkish troops on the ground in Iraq.

The message has not been received by the Turkish government.

Which is why the Iraqi government and various officials are now pushing
back against talk of Turkish troops remaining in Iraq for another year
and Erdogan's talk of what a post-liberated Mosul should be made up of.

Factions of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) are threatening to
attack US troops that participate in the battle to liberate Mosul from
the Islamic State (IS), but the Iraqi government hopes to smooth things
over.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said his government will work on a
consensus formula to convince PMU factions of the need to involve US
troops in the battle to resolve the problem as soon as possible. He also
hopes to persuade Washington that the PMU is a national force of the Iraqi state and should be part of a special military system to liberate Mosul.

It turned out that the weapons depot was one managed by a Shiite
Muslim volunteer militia, one of those belonging to Hezbollah in Iraq.
The militia have these weapons in order to be able to fight the
extremist group known as the Islamic State, which has caused the
security crisis in Iraq. The weapons were stored in an abandoned
factory. After the fire, Baghdad’s provincial council and the federal
government put out statements saying that militias should not be storing
weapons in highly populated areas in the central city. The militias
themselves expressed regret, saying that they would try and prevent
their fighters from storing weapons inside cities and that they would
try and follow the orders on the subject issued by the Ministries of the
Defence and the Interior as well as Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s
office.The militias involved began to move weapons out of some of the better
known storage facilities and they also began closing some of their more
random offices and unlicensed premises. But the ordinary citizens of
Baghdad remain concerned. Some of the militias refuse to divulge where
they are storing weapons and civilians suspect the depots are to be
found in apartment buildings and other non-military facilities.The Iraqi security services have said that they know of around 20
weapons depots in the capital. Some are in the Sadda neighbourhood in
Sadr City toward the east, in Hurriyah and Shula toward the north and
Maalef in the south. There are also other secret locations they know
nothing about. The militias store the weapons everywhere from
uninhabited houses and abandoned storage facilities to unused mosques
and schools.

Yesterday, the US Defense Dept announced:

Strikes in IraqAttack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft, as well as
rocket artillery, conducted 14 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in
support of Iraq’s government:-- Near Beiji, a strike destroyed an ISIL weapons cache and damaged a vehicle.-- Near Hit, a strike destroyed an ISIL heavy machine gun.-- Near Kisik, a strike destroyed two tunnel entrances and suppressed a mortar firing position.-- Near Mosul, four strikes engaged an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed two ISIL headquarters buildings and a front-end loader.-- Near Ramadi, two strikes engaged an ISIL tactical unit and a
staging area, and destroyed four vehicles, a fuel truck, three
ISIL-held buildings, a weapons cache, a supply cache and a mortar
system.-- Near Rawah, a strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle storage area.-- Near Sultan Abdallah, two strikes engaged an ISIL tactical
unit, destroying five ISIL-held buildings and four repeater tower
generators. A light machine gun was suppressed.-- Near Tal Afar, two strikes engaged two ISIL tactical units,
destroying two tunnel entrances, two ISIL-held buildings and a vehicle. A
sniper firing position was suppressed.

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic
events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a
single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a
single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle
is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons
against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for
example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or
impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not
report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number
of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual
munition impact points against a target. Ground-based artillery fired in
counterfire or in fire support to maneuver roles is not classified as a
strike.

And in other news, ALSUMARIA reports
that Salman Jumaili, the Minister of Trade, is being accused of
poisoning the people of Iraq by purchasing rotten rice by a member of
Parliament's Integrity Commission who also states that this member of
the Cabinet could not have acted without the knowledge of Prime Minister
Haider al-Abadi and states Abadi must take questions from the
Parliament.

Over the weekend, UNAMI issued the following:

Baghdad, Iraq, 01 October 2016 – A total of 1,003 Iraqis were
killed and another 1,159 were injured in acts of terrorism, violence and
armed conflict in Iraq, including Anbar, in September 2016*, according
to casualty figures recorded by the United Nations Assistance Mission
for Iraq (UNAMI).

A total of 394 members of the Iraqi Security Forces
(including Peshmerga, SWAT and militias fighting alongside the Iraqi
Army but excluding Anbar Operations) were killed and 208 were injured
(not including casualties from Anbar).

According to information obtained by UNAMI from the
Health Directorate in Anbar, the Governorate suffered a total of 254
Civilian casualties (219 killed and 35 injured). Figures are updated
until 28 September, inclusive.

“It is a very sad state of
affairs that the numbers of Iraqis killed and injured remains very high
and unacceptable. Civilians continue to bear the brunt of the violence,”
Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Iraq
(SRSG), Mr. Ján Kubiš said.

“The Holy month of Muharram has started and I sincerely hope that the killings will stop during this month,” SRSG Kubiš added.

*CAVEATS:
In general, UNAMI has been hindered in effectively verifying casualties
in conflict areas. Figures for casualties from Anbar Governorate are
provided by the Health Directorate and are noted below. Casualty figures
obtained from the Anbar Health Directorate might not fully reflect the
real number of casualties in those areas due to the volatility of the
situation on the ground and the disruption of services. In some cases,
UNAMI could only partially verify certain incidents. UNAMI has also
received, without being able to verify, reports of large numbers of
casualties along with unknown numbers of persons who have died from
secondary effects of violence after having fled their homes due to
exposure to the elements, lack of water, food, medicines and health
care. For these reasons, the figures reported have to be considered as
the absolute minimum.